View of the Hebrews

View of the Hebrews is an 1823 book written by Ethan Smith, a United States Congregationalist minister, who argued that Native Americans were descended from the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. This was a relatively common view during the early nineteenth century, as most Europeans and Americans had a view of history as biblical. Numerous commentators on Mormon history, from LDS Church general authority B. H. Roberts to Fawn M. Brodie, biographer of Joseph Smith, have noted similarities in the content of View of the Hebrews and the Book of Mormon, which was first published in 1830, seven years after Ethan Smith's book.

Ethan Smith suggested that Native Americans were descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel; this theory was held by many theologians and laymen of his day who tried to fit new populations into what they understood of Biblical history, which they felt encompassed the world. These tribes were believed to have disappeared after being taken captive by the Assyrians in the 8th century BCE.Terryl Givens calls the work "an inelegant blend of history, excerpts, exhortation, and theorizing."

Smith's speculation was inspired by the apocryphal 2 Esdras 13:41, which says that the Ten Tribes traveled to a far country, "where never mankind dwelt"—which Smith interpreted to mean North America. During Smith's day, speculation about the Ten Lost Tribes was heightened both by a renewed interest in biblical prophecy and by the belief that the aboriginal peoples who had been swept aside by European settlers could not have been the same as the ancient people who created the sophisticated earthwork mounds found throughout the Mississippi Valley and southeastern North America. Smith attempted to rescue Indians from the contemporary myth of mound builders being a separate race by making the indigenous people "potential converts worthy of salvation." "If our natives be indeed from the tribes of Israel," Smith wrote, "American Christians may well feel, that one great object of their inheritance here, is, that they may have a primary agency in restoring those 'lost sheep of the house of Israel.'"

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